Low Cost Development of HF Receiver Prototype for HF-START Field Campaign

HF-START (HF Simulator Targeting for All-users' Regional Telecommunications) is a user-friendly simulator developed to meet the needs of space weather users. Because prediction of communications failure due to space weather disturbances is of high priority and must be reliable, HF-START is necessary to be evaluated. A simple and low cost prototype of software defined radio (SDR) based digital receiver is developed for the HF experiment to evaluate the HF-START during the field campaign. The field campaign employs the receiver prototype in addition to existing domestic ionospheric observations in Japan. The experiment allows analyzing the effect of the ionosphere on radio propagation delay. The first experiment has proven the capability of the low cost prototype as its result showed very good signal quality with loud and clear playback ability. Extending similar experiment to Southeast Asia is planned.